


A Fate Worse Than Death

by C_M_H_Snoozie



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Guardians of Childhood - Freeform, Horror, Other, Rise of the Guardians - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 08:54:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24967051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/C_M_H_Snoozie/pseuds/C_M_H_Snoozie
Summary: Pitch managed to overlook one small but devastating detail in his plans to be rid of the Guardians, things fall out of control very quickly as he learns about the importance of balance.
Relationships: enemies - Relationship
Kudos: 8





	A Fate Worse Than Death

A temporary set back from that pesky sprite, Frost was hardly going to scupper the Nightmare King’s sense of triumph over _finally_ disposing of the man that had destroyed his whole life! No more would he have to tiptoe out into the shadows for fear of being spotted by those accursed golden eyes, no more would he have to suffer the crack of one of those dreamsand whips. He was free at last, the other Guardians would not last long without Sandy filling children’s heads with happy little dreams of Santa Clause or rabbits or little fairies, Easter was close enough that he could ruin all hope too and that prospect was equally delicious.

He sent his nightmares ahead of him, told them to spread horror and then return home, he had some things he wanted to do first. Really the Nightmare King wanted to celebrate and that of course came in the form of gloating. He waltzed himself into a moonbeam and looked up at his other enemy, still just that little bit out of his reach _for now._ “I wanted to thank you,” Pitch hummed into the light, daring enough now to stand in the glow in full view, there was no one around to stop him, not truly anymore. “After all it was you who woke him again, wasn’t it? He might have spent another eternity peacefully sleeping on an impossible island, far out my reach if you had not decided to use him for your bidding.” Pitch’s smirk was cruel and savoured as he pretended to check his nails casually while he really internally wished he could still hear the reaction of the Man in the Moon, no matter, “The last starling, older than most of the Universe, legendary and beloved lost star pilot, killed in fighting your battles for you on a single little oasis rock in a desert system.” He shook his head in mocked disappointment, relishing his chance to speak at the glaring orb of a former ship. “Oh, what would your parents say?”

He shivered with his own delight and he stopped pretending to check his nails to look directly at the man that was no doubt watching him through his telescope. “I’ll take them all before this orbit’s end, I’ll make sure you can watch each one of them fade away to nothing and I will make the children of this floating rock wail so loud in fear and sadness that you will never drown out the noise, you will never escape your failure.” Just as he couldn’t, Pitch grinned menacingly and stepped out of the light, vanishing into a shadow and moving at the speed of darkness to get back to his lair.

Pitch sauntered back into his gloom, the spring in his step and the malevolent grin enough to terrify even the bravest of souls and he sensed the horror all around him as he walked through the cages of fairies. They were not chirping sadly, most were covering their faces, turned to face the nearest wall and shivering with the bitter sweet fear of death that Pitch did so enjoy. They must have heard or known of the Sandman’s demise somehow and he had to partly admire them for seeming to understand what that would mean for any human or creature that tried to sleep from that moment on.

He chuckled menacingly at them for their cowering, drinking in every flavour of their fear, nearly drunk on the abundance of it trapped all around him. “Come now, don’t be so shy, why don’t you look at me?” He asked all of them, daring them to so he could relish in renewed fear. Only some of them did, little flutters of checks on him with no fresh fear, some even seemed to hold relief? He cocked his eyebrow at the unwelcomed taste and hissed to himself, letting his mind work away at what that could have meant and leaving the hall they were imprisoned in to walk into the more shadowed corners of his domain.

The ground was soft, shifting and unsteady under his feet. He slipped a step but regained his balance to check what was happening. There was Nightmaresand _everywhere!_ Urgh, how had the starling coped with such uncertain footing?! He scoffed and whistled to summon a mare to gather the sand with. Impatiently he folded his arms and tapped his foot on the soft ground, they had to be back by now, what other explanation was there for the amount of loose sand on the floor? No mare approached, there was not even the flare of nostrils in greeting or the clap of hooves even on the sand, just a thick silence. Strange. Pitch felt his arms fall to his side and a sigh escaped him, he could clear it up himself he supposed, he could always create more nightmares that way.

He gestured at the floor and lifted his hand in a practiced wave to lift the grains, only nothing happened. He felt a frown crease his forehead as he tried again to no avail. Was it his sand at all? In a quick stoop, he grabbed a handful and sifted it between his fingers. It felt like his nightmare sand, okay it was originally Sandy’s dreamsand but that defeated the point. Unless… the little pudgy ball of light was what had been keeping the sand active both in dreams and nightmares? No, that couldn’t be, the nightmares helped him descend upon Jack after the Sandman was already dead. His mouth twisted in thought and he took another handful to try to mould into a short nightmare, a small simple one he had learned to corrupt not all too long ago. It balled and spiked in his hand without taking any real shape nor really listening to his will as he grasped it in both hands and tried to physically sculpt it.

The sand shifted somewhere in the shadows, Pitch assumed it was one of the nightmares and he turned to order it closer to test that he still had control, but when he did so, he could not see anything. He dropped the sand he had been trying to shape looked expertly into the gloom. There was something moving, a triangle? Not quite flat but shaped with a soft curve pointing back over itself as it moved and changed direction in a slow zigzag. “What in the name of shadows is that supposed to be?” He argued with himself, was he incapable of making anything more than just a moveable shape now? Angrily he stamped towards it, leaving footprints in the sand, hearing them shift away again after he stepped. “Come here!” Pitch ordered and pointed to the floor at his feet. The triangle obeyed, turning in a slow curve to approach as commanded, something about it struck a familiar if relatively distant cord with the King as he frowned.

The sand in front of him rippled as the triangle approached that bit quicker, showing no sign of slowing down. Pitch stood his ground though, he was not afraid of his own sands. When it was only a short distance away, the triangle seemed to grow, to morph at the bottom into something rounder, colossal even as a wide gaping burned gold hole appeared, with rows and rows of pointed teeth! Shark! Pitch leaped out of the way as the beast snapped its jaw closed and crashed back into the sand where Pitch had originally been standing. What was this?! Pitch pushed himself onto his feet and let himself fade back into the shadows of his own lair, watching for any sign of movement that did not belong to him. What had happened to his nightmares and where had that shark come from… could he use it?

Something formed in the darkness in the middle of the room, a row of pointed teeth in an unnaturally wide grin. A pit for eyes with two sets of golden irises each, shifting through the air with malicious glee as the eyes seemed to search for him. How dare this creature, this being interfere with his sands! Not when he had just claimed them truly and properly from the Sandman himself. Pitch stepped out of his hiding place, allowing his shadows to grow all around the set of glowing eyes that turned to face him slowly, radiating a sort of _malice_ that even gave Pitch some pause. The pointed grin turned his way too at a familiar height. A grey face emerged, oval and small with a rounded nose, tiny hands with sharpened nails and a _pudgy_ structure.

“ _Kozmotisss.”_ Roared a voice deep in Pitch’s head but so too all around him as if several hundred beings were uttering that useless name at him all at once. A voice loud, too loud for Earth and too much for his home as rubble from the ceiling shook and rumbled free, landing in the sea of black sand without a noise, absorbed by swathes of the grains. “ _You are late.”_ It hissed, Pitch’s eyes landed on the figure before him again, a husk of the Sandman, in nightmaresand clothes with grey hair and an evil to it that Pitch had only aspired towards.

“Kozmotis is dead, long dead.” Pitch answered back with impatience, what a stupid thing to call him, he had almost been impressed with the entrance whatever the thing was had made, then it had his name wrong and ruined it all. The husk of the Sandman lurched forward in short bursts, fragmented and out of step, slightly to the right and then appearing a good few steps closer in a black flash, grin still frozen on his face as the doubled eyes stared at Pitch, getting right up close to his face, floating on a nightmaresand hill to look him in the eye. The husk’s head tilted to the side and that grin grew impossibly larger.

“ _I shall call you whatever I like.”_ The voice boomed mercilessly, menacingly as the sand shifted like waves on the ocean around the room, it was everywhere and Pitch had not even considered such vast quantities of the stuff. Just how was he going to clear it all away when the time came? Silver eyes stuck to the gold without much care given away, sure he hated the intrusion and this new _thing_ was the most interesting encounter he had in a long time, but he was hardly afraid of a bit of sand.

“What is in a name?” Pitch laughed back at the other, “I am Pitch Black, who or what are you?” A genuine question, he certainly had his curiosity. The husk didn’t move nor did that insufferable grin disappear from his features. His eyes did at least blink though, all four pupils expanding and retracting again as he looked at Pitch once more in thought.

“ _I am Sanderson… reborn.”_ The voice rattled, causing a crack to form in one of the walls, shooting up towards the ceiling. What a mess this thing was making! “ _Sanderson, unlimited.”_ Came the follow up and Pitch couldn’t help but roll his eyes.

“You are not Sanderson, he is dead, you are a manifestation in nightmare, nothing more.” That had to be the case, the dreamweaver created things in his sleep all the time, Pitch must have just done so in his subconscious in all of his excitement in finally defeating his foe. “Now, go away, I have work to do.”

“ _You do not command me.”_ Laughed the being menacingly, the husk sinking back into the mass of sand as it swirled into a ball around him, tendrils snapping and wrapping around what was left of the lair to cling to like a rapidly growing vine. “ _I see that you are nothing.”_

Well, now that was a sentence too far! Pitch summoned his scythe and made to crash it down on the ball of sand. “I am the _Nightmare King!”_ He yelled viciously as he let the shadows swamp the halls into total darkness. His scythe never landed though, slipping through the sand to no effect. Pitch could see that awful face emerge again in the ball of nightmaresand, despite the darkness he had plunged them both into. A tiny grey hand reached out and caught hold of Pitch’s pointed chin. Solid. Real.

“ _What is a King to a **God**?” _He demanded as nightmaresand tendrils whipped around Pitch and held him in a swirling band that squeezed and trapped his arms to his side. For the briefest of moments, Pitch felt fear for the first time in a long time, true and raw fear for what it all could mean. That toothy grin only grew in front of his eyes, wide and menacing. “ _Nothing.”_ The voice boomed and the tendrils hurled Pitch around like a ragdoll, into the ocean of nightmaresand and holing him under as it did shodows knows what to his lair, hidden behind the curtain of dense and relentless sands.

Eventually, he resurfaced, still held in a tendril of nightmaresand as if Sandy’s whips had reformed into something much stronger and inescapable. Just what had happened to cause what he was seeing? If the being truly was Sanderson, what did that _mean_ exactly?

“ _You did this.”_ The voice boomed again, had it heard his questions? He knew Sandy had the ability to connect with all the minds of sleeping beings but that did not apply to those awake, did it? Then again he had once been a granter of wishes, people had to be awake to make a wish and he had once been able to hear their whispers even from space. “ _You allowed me to merge completely with the sands. I had merely fallen before, but now, **now** I am truly free.”_ The room filled with low laughter, the sort that made Pitch’s very bones vibrate uncomfortably with each beat. “ _I can hear them all. I know their fears, their worst nightmares, each and every one of them.”_ The grin shrank just that little bit as all four golden irises turned to Pitch slowly. “ _I know your fears. I know you are scared and I know of your mind and past.”_

Pitch’s mind suddenly filled with the prison the pirates had once been kept in, the power of the constellations long gone but somehow still felt present, the colossal cosmos and all it’s history, the horrifying beings that even Pitch had never had the grace to see where Sandy had once been. Never did he think he would miss the little golden starling more than he did in that moment. “ _What happens when you kill a star, Kosmotis?”_ Boomed a voice inside his head, louder even than the one that had been physically present, Pitch struggled to try and press his hands to his ears to no avail, this creature was now quite happily in his head, tearing through the pirates that lurked with in, swallowing them into his own existence as they had once done to the long lost general. “ _You create a black hole. Is that not always what you wanted? Am I not granting your biggest wish of a darkness that will even consume and destroy light itself?”_

No, he had not wanted that. How could he have been so foolish? How did he allow himself to forget what Sandy was truly made of, where the starpilot had come from, how old he was and how unknowing he had been about the reality of the Starlings and their lifespans? He had clearly acted rashly, a short sighted misstep that now he was deeply regretting, Sandy had morals and benevolence, but in that corrupted arrow, he had clearly taken that away and made him more powerful than Pitch had ever dared to imagine. The tendril threw him into the air and as he felt himself falling back down to the pit of shadows under him, ultimately to be swallowed by the darkness he had once been so excited to spread, he sensed the husk of the man he had once known did not want him dead, he knew that and yet, that was even more terrifying than the alternative. He landed in the sand and felt himself imprisoned within it, at the mercy of whatever bidding the _new_ Sandman wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> I KNOW I said I wouldn't do this until ADP was finished but I have been itching to publish this now since the idea came to me. I intend to continue this one but for now it stands as a one shot until I have finished off the next five chapters for A Darker Path. I hope you enjoyed and I most sincerely apologise for that little graphic at the end there.


End file.
